Harvard ILJ

Major international legal instruments commit international law to protect language rights absolutely, irrespective of counter-pressures toward linguistic uniformity. This unconditional commitment to language rights is echoed in the writings of prominent human rights scholars, who argue that language is a constitutive element of cultural identity. This article contrasts the ideals of language rights with the actual record of their enforcement. [...]

Many celebrate international law as a way to compel states to protect human rights. Often it serves this role. But sometimes it has the reverse effect: states use international agreements to circumvent individual rights in domestic law. For example, the United States reportedly relied on Italy’s consent to render a terrorist suspect from the streets of Milan into [...]

This Article examines the adoption of rights in national constitutions in the post-World War II period in light of claims of global convergence. Using a comprehensive database on the contents of the world’s constitutions, we observe a qualified convergence on the content of rights. Nearly every single right has increased in prevalence since its introduction, but very few [...]

This Article examines the widely practiced—and widely ignored—phenomenon of “international vote buying” among states, that is, conduct whereby states offer material benefits to other states in exchange for their votes or decisions in international institutions. Domestically, such behavior would be patently illegal as bribery or election fraud. Yet under international law, it is both legal [...]

Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (Zum ewigen Frieden), established a concept of cosmopolitan law as the nemesis of war, instilling in generations of thinkers and practitioners a vision of a world without conflict. Kant’s paradigm posited that “republican constitutions, a commercial spirit of international trade, and a federation of interdependent [...]

In recent years foreign investors have used a rapidly expanding network of bilateral and multilateral investment treaties to directly sue states before international tribunals for violations of international law. There have now been hundreds of such lawsuits, with tribunals occasionally granting investors massive damage awards. In the process of resolving these disputes, tribunals announce and [...]

In June 2010 in Kampala, Uganda, the states that are party to the Statute of the International Criminal Court agreed to amend the ICC Statute to add the crime of aggression to the Court’s jurisdiction. One of the key compromises that made this possible was the adoption of a U.S.-proposed “understanding” which provided that the [...]

This Article examines the typical characteristics and constitutional consequences of a largely neglected phenomenon that I call the “democratic coup d’´etat.” To date, the academic legal literature has analyzed all military coups under an anti-democratic framework. That conventional framework considers military coups to be entirely anti-democratic and assumes that all coups are perpetrated by power-hungry [...]

One of the fundamental international law questions over the past two decades has been the structure of the United Nations Security Council. In a world of variable multipolarity, whereby changing crises demand different combinations of actors with relevant resources and shared interests, the Council’s reform should be based not on expanded permanent membership—as mistakenly held [...]

In December 2010, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issued the text of the Basel III Framework, a series of global financial regulations that respond to the Great Recession, the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Basel III is the third iteration of the Basel Accords, which, along with the Basel Committee and its negotiation process, have [...]

On August 4, 2011, an arbitral tribunal at ICSID set new precedent for the
arbitration world, allowing a class of 60,000 Italian nationals to sue Argentina under a bilateral investment treaty for losses sustained during its debt restructuring. If followed, the decision will likely have significant impact on sovereign debt restructuring, the
drafting of arbitration clauses, and the scope of ICSID jurisdiction over mass
claims arbitrations.

[This article] argues that India and China’s antidumping regimes pose a larger long-term threat to the global trade regime than is commonly believed. Through novel empirical tests of the two leading theories, I demonstrate why China and India’s recent increase in antidumping protectionism is not temporary and not destined to level off.